WHAT GROWING TRAFFIC OUT OF KAMPALA SAYS ABOUT UGANDA

Pictures on Christmas Eve, of traffic bumper-to-bumper on the Kampala-Masaka and Kampala-Jinja highway caused a sensation on social media.

One photo caption had it that the Kampala-Masaka highway had been turned into a one-way street. Another picture taken in Mabira on the Kampala-Jinja highway showed three lane snarl up beyond the horizon.

It is safe to say that the rush up county during the Christmas season has intensified over the years.

The mad dash out of Kampala should not come as surprise. With almost 80% of the population in the rural areas, the probability is that most urban dwellers either grew up in the rural areas or are one generation removed from our rural roots...

So it’s the most natural thing for us to go back to the village to confer with the elders, reunite with long lost friends and dare I say, impress the villagers at how well we are doing in the city.

It is during the festive season that people from Kampala are introduced at church congregations and other public gatherings. The people from Kampala are what having arrived looks like for the rural people.

And it is a big deal. To the returnees and their rural cousins.

You can tell because related to that massive motor exodus up country, is the ghost town quality that Kampala assumes at the end of the year. All the cars have, as if, been vacuumed off the streets of our capital.

Many years ago during the Christmas period there used to be a seasonal shortage of sodas on the market. Our beverage bottlers didn’t have the capacity to match the spike in demand during the festive period. Some people made a killing by hoarding sodas and marking them up at twice or even thrice the price during the normal days of the year. That is a thing of the past now, because the production and variety of beverages to be had, have increased.

Clearly the hiking of transport fares out of Kampala during the Christmas period follows a similar supply-demand pattern. Believe it or not, but bus companies can hike transport fares because there are not enough buses going up country to cater for the explosion in demand. Hence the doubling and tripling of bus fares...

Also the chockablock traffic on major highways suggests that, once again that the private sector is moving much faster than public investment.

Nearly 30 years ago in 1991 there were about 50,000 cars on our roads. In 2011 Uganda Revenue Authority (URA) reported there were 635,656. By extrapolation, for lack of a more current number, there are about 1,754,000 cars on our roads today. In about 30 years the number of cars in Uganda have grown by a factor of 30.

Our paved, or tarmac, roads on the other hand have grown to just over 5,000 km from 580 km over the same period, a tenfold growth.

Is it any wonder then that when we power our vehicles for the annual ritual, that we end up in a situation, not unlike molasses trying to squeeze through a small noozle?

The numbers seem to suggest we need to expand our road network, allowing for more options out of Kampala than the major trunk roads. Or alternatively expand those same trunk roads, say to six lane highways to ease the flow of traffic during the festive season.

I think better use of our money would be to pave alternative routes before expand the major trunk roads, why expand the highways for the one day freakshow?

Probably a more cost effective solution maybe to recommit to building a railway network around the country. Train transport, running a 24-hour schedule, can carry more people, cheaper and more cost effectively than the best road transport.

As if seating in traffic for hours is not bad enough, this same phenomenon is one of the most manifest signs of inequality in the country today.

Last week the UNDP Human Development Index (HDI) ranked Uganda 159 out 189 countries. The HDI, which measures the quality of life of a country’s citizens in terms of life expectancy and access to essential services, is a better measure of how an economy is working for its people than the traditional GDP per capita measures.

This deficiency is one of the best justifications for the rush to play catch up and lay down the transport, communication and energy infrastructure. The concentration of economic activity around Kampala can be correlated to the concentration of infrastructure in and around the capital city. And by extension the concentration of human resource.

A determined, systematic expansion of infrastructure upcountry is bound to stimulate economic activity there, as production grows in response to improved access to markets, improving incomes and growing wealth upcountry.

If this is done, maybe like the soda shortages of yesteryear, the Christmas traffic will remain in the past, a legend we can tell our grandchildren about.